The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
An objective in service monitoring is to determine whether the equipment used at a service facility is efficiently utilized. Equipment throughput monitoring may be especially important in facilities that have deployed equipment or devices that are expensive and unique. Such facilities may include medical clinics and laboratories that operate expensive chemistry, hematology, molecular or other analyzers, mass spectroscopes, computer-tomography scanners, and the like. The capital cost of such equipment may motivate maximal use of the equipment to defray its costs; further, some equipment may achieve operational cost efficiency only through continuous or regular use. Monitoring of the activities performed by such devices may help in generating data for optimizing throughput of the devices and determining whether any of the devices has any spare capacity. In particular, the monitoring may help in identifying time periods during which some of the devices are underutilized.
Equipment throughput in a service facility may be determined by visual monitoring of the equipment and recording information about the workload levels of the devices. However, in some situations, the information obtained via manual visual monitoring may be incomplete or insufficient to determine the actual throughput or the actual spare capacity characteristics of the devices. For example, visually determined and manually recorded information may fail to accurately itemize some of the activities, or the exact time periods during which some activities take place. Also, some counts of the activities, in certain patient types, may not be reflected in the visually determined and manually recorded workload information. However, if such services significantly impact the workload of the devices, but information about them is unavailable, then determining the equipment throughput and spare capacity accurately may be difficult.